WEBVTT 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:21.200 Hey, I'm going to start this week. 00:00:21.200 --> 00:00:31.280 We're continuing our series, "Unforced." I'm going to start this week with a confession. 00:00:31.280 --> 00:00:37.760 Anybody who's worked with me at this church already knows this. You can see this group 00:00:37.760 --> 00:00:49.120 right here. Already is going to be trouble. I'm not good with grief. You don't have to 00:00:49.120 --> 00:01:00.440 laugh. I'm not good with grief. Not mine. Not yours. Give me almost any other hard conversation 00:01:00.440 --> 00:01:07.600 and I'm fine. Doubt, deconstruction, hell, politics, questions. The questions you were 00:01:07.600 --> 00:01:15.920 told not to ask anyone, sit down. Let's go. I'm in. But tell me somebody your life is really 00:01:15.920 --> 00:01:25.320 sick or has died and I can say I'm sorry and I mean it. I truly do care. Then if you want 00:01:25.320 --> 00:01:31.340 to sit down and start talking about those feelings, I'm like a fish out of water. I'm 00:01:31.340 --> 00:01:39.920 like looking for the door. Not because I don't love you, but because something in me doesn't 00:01:39.920 --> 00:01:47.880 know what to do in that room. I've thought about where that comes from for quite a while. 00:01:47.880 --> 00:01:53.160 I think there's a few things. Some of it is just wiring. It's personality in me. I don't 00:01:53.160 --> 00:01:59.080 like negative feelings. I'm like no, we're happy. Let's, on the Enneagram, I'm a seven, 00:01:59.080 --> 00:02:06.680 which just means I won the Enneagram. But also that I don't know how to deal with negative 00:02:06.680 --> 00:02:15.440 emotions. Some of it's experience. You've heard me talk about Iraq and my time in service 00:02:15.440 --> 00:02:23.400 and a nervous system that's learned over these deployments and this time to like shut shut 00:02:23.400 --> 00:02:32.720 a door fast. It doesn't love leaving one open that has to talk about those type of emotions. 00:02:32.720 --> 00:02:42.160 But a lot of it as I've kind of dug into this more, probably most of it is how I was raised. 00:02:42.160 --> 00:02:50.480 What I mean, including and maybe, maybe especially in church. Because nobody ever taught me to 00:02:50.480 --> 00:03:01.520 grieve. I was taught to get past things, trust God, be strong for everybody else. Men don't 00:03:01.520 --> 00:03:14.280 cry. Everything happens for a reason. They're in a better place. God needed another angel. 00:03:14.280 --> 00:03:18.320 I would reach for those sentences the way that like you reach for like a light switch 00:03:18.320 --> 00:03:30.080 in a dark room during a better place. All right. We're happy now, right? Fast, not thinking 00:03:30.080 --> 00:03:35.000 about it. Flip the light on. Because the dark was uncomfortable and the switch was right 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:41.680 there. Just I had the line. And here's why I'm telling you this on a Sunday. I don't 00:03:41.680 --> 00:03:47.560 think I'm the only one in this room here that was built like this. Somebody in your life 00:03:47.560 --> 00:03:52.520 is hurting right now. And you already know what you're going to type on their Facebook 00:03:52.520 --> 00:03:58.720 page. Remember when Facebook added the little emoji that's like the little hug emoji? It's 00:03:58.720 --> 00:04:03.360 like, oh, sweet. Now I got something. I can just do that. I don't love what you posted, 00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:13.360 but I can hug you. You know, like I'm praying for you. Maybe a little heart emoji. Maybe 00:04:13.360 --> 00:04:20.760 the hug emoji. Let me know if you need anything, which we all know means like, please don't. 00:04:20.760 --> 00:04:30.840 I've sent that text. Somebody, like I, I love to scroll through Instagram. I get stuck. 00:04:30.840 --> 00:04:35.520 Mine and I were talking about this the other day. Like I don't see posts a lot of times. 00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:44.200 I see stories and I see reels because I get stuck in a reel and I'm just anybody else. 00:04:44.200 --> 00:04:49.400 And there was a clip that I saw a while back. Do you guys, do you guys save reels and stuff 00:04:49.400 --> 00:04:55.760 on your Instagram? Man, I have so many saved. And I have a folder that's like, say something 00:04:55.760 --> 00:05:02.040 about this that I never say anything about or like, hey, remember this or hey, look this 00:05:02.040 --> 00:05:05.880 up. And the other day, I was like, I don't ever go back to these. Let me go look. And 00:05:05.880 --> 00:05:12.160 I went into the folder. It was like, hey, remember this. And I found this clip from a 00:05:12.160 --> 00:05:21.120 lady. Her name is Dr. Oka Joshy Hanson. Joshy Joshy. I think she's a futurist. She works 00:05:21.120 --> 00:05:28.320 on this idea of like, how kids learn. She started out as a public school teacher. She's 00:05:28.320 --> 00:05:33.240 a first generation American, first in her family to finish college. And she didn't just 00:05:33.240 --> 00:05:38.920 finish college. Like she went and got a doctorate from Oxford in philosophy and neuroscience. 00:05:38.920 --> 00:05:45.920 And then went and got a law degree from Harvard. Because who doesn't do that? I short a book, 00:05:45.920 --> 00:05:52.560 a book called The Future of Smart. And when I was listening to like, how she talked about, 00:05:52.560 --> 00:05:58.280 I went through a ton of her reels, but how she talked about how kids learn and how our 00:05:58.280 --> 00:06:05.800 education system is not set up well for kids to learn or that it is set up well for kids 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:13.360 to learn a specific way. But I was watching her, this real talk that she gave in. I've 00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:19.360 got a clip that I want to show you. I want to preface something. She's going to say something 00:06:19.360 --> 00:06:28.040 at the beginning of this, where she says the left. I know it's political. You're going 00:06:28.040 --> 00:06:33.920 to be okay. Because I think what she says and she's quoting Trevor Noah, what she says 00:06:33.920 --> 00:06:42.280 is I feel like a really good profound statement. And I think it could broad swath around everyone. 00:06:42.280 --> 00:06:46.760 But also, I do believe that this affects exactly what Trevor Noah is talking about. So we're 00:06:46.760 --> 00:06:49.640 going to play this clip. It's like a minute long. So watch this real quick. 00:06:52.104 --> 00:06:57.904 [Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen] Yeah, so Trevor Noah said something recently that I've just been sitting with, I haven't 00:06:57.904 --> 00:07:00.424 been able to stop thinking about it. 00:07:00.424 --> 00:07:08.504 He said the left lost its imagination when it lost its connection to faith. 00:07:08.504 --> 00:07:13.744 And I don't think you have to be religious for that to land, because I think what he 00:07:13.744 --> 00:07:19.704 was pointing at is something that I've been watching happen across institutions and communities 00:07:19.704 --> 00:07:27.644 and movements, and it's that we've lost the practice ability to believe that things can 00:07:27.644 --> 00:07:37.624 be genuinely, structurally, actually different, like not just a little better, but transformed. 00:07:37.624 --> 00:07:43.744 And the traditions that sustained people throughout the worst of history, I think they understood 00:07:43.744 --> 00:07:51.464 something that we've largely forgotten, and that's that hope isn't a feeling. 00:07:51.464 --> 00:07:56.304 It's a discipline, it's a muscle, and you build it the way you build any other capacity 00:07:56.304 --> 00:08:04.904 through practice, through practice with community, through repeatedly engaging in this act of 00:08:04.904 --> 00:08:11.824 naming a possible future and moving towards it, even if the evidence isn't on your side 00:08:11.824 --> 00:08:16.744 yet and the reality is the evidence can't be there because it doesn't yet exist. 00:08:16.744 --> 00:08:21.664 So Martin Luther King, for example, he didn't have proof that the beloved community was 00:08:21.664 --> 00:08:22.664 coming, right? 00:08:22.664 --> 00:08:30.704 What he did have is a trained imagination and people who were willing to act as if the 00:08:30.704 --> 00:08:37.144 beloved community were real, and that combination changed the world. 00:08:37.144 --> 00:08:41.304 So I don't think we need more information right now. 00:08:41.304 --> 00:08:48.224 I think we need to rebuild our capacity to believe in what we can't yet see. 00:08:48.224 --> 00:08:52.864 Whether that's in ourselves, in each other, that's a skill. 00:08:52.864 --> 00:08:55.144 And like any skill, it can be learned. 00:08:59.900 --> 00:09:04.300 You're not out of hope. You're out of practice. 00:09:00.920 --> 00:09:11.680 She talks about how hope is a, isn't a feeling that shows up once the evidence finally lines 00:09:11.680 --> 00:09:19.240 up, right? It's a muscle. You build it by using it. And did you catch what she said about 00:09:19.240 --> 00:09:26.920 Martin Luther King? He didn't have proof that the beloved community was coming. What he 00:09:26.920 --> 00:09:36.220 had was a trained imagination and people willing to act as if it were already real. It's a 00:09:36.220 --> 00:09:42.920 practice. And that's what the series is about, this unforced rhythms of grace. And I, I want 00:09:42.920 --> 00:09:52.080 to put one sentence next to this and we're going to spend the next like half hour on it. 00:09:52.080 --> 00:10:02.280 You cannot train imagination on a numbed heart. And most of us were handed a faith that taught 00:10:02.280 --> 00:10:11.960 us to numb. But Martin stood up here last month and he named that gap exactly. In his 00:10:11.960 --> 00:10:17.760 story, he grew up in church. He learned how to do it right. He said it himself. I learned 00:10:17.760 --> 00:10:25.120 how to perform. And then he said the thing I want everyone of us to hear. Nobody ever 00:10:25.120 --> 00:10:34.760 told him what to do with grief, with suffering, with a world falling apart. There was no class 00:10:34.760 --> 00:10:40.200 for that. So when his world actually did fall apart, the good Christian kid had a full toolkit 00:10:40.200 --> 00:10:52.700 for performing. And nothing at all for grieving. Surviving isn't living is what he said. And 00:10:52.700 --> 00:11:02.940 watch what he said happen next. Because it's a whole series in one life story. He didn't 00:11:02.940 --> 00:11:09.840 fix it by finding a better argument. He said, I didn't lose God. I lost a version of God. 00:11:09.840 --> 00:11:22.000 The version that only worked while everything was fine. And when he finally stopped performing 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:26.600 long enough to actually grieve the thing he found underneath it wasn't absence. His words 00:11:26.600 --> 00:11:34.520 were, love had been holding me all along. That's not a mark problem. That was a curriculum 00:11:34.520 --> 00:11:41.560 problem that he was handed and put into. And for a lot of you, like me, the grief you were 00:11:41.560 --> 00:11:48.240 never allowed to feel is a very specific grief. It's a grief of losing a church, a community, 00:11:48.240 --> 00:11:55.160 a version of God that used to hold you and then didn't. Some of you walked away from 00:11:55.160 --> 00:12:04.680 a whole world, friends, family rhythms, a Sunday that used to feel like home. And nobody threw 00:12:04.680 --> 00:12:12.160 you a funeral. Instead, you got one of two sentences. The people you left told you you 00:12:12.160 --> 00:12:21.000 had backslidden. You walked away from God. You were in the world. As if you hadn't lost 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:26.960 anything, you'd just gotten lazy. And the people who'd already left told you to be glad. You're 00:12:26.960 --> 00:12:33.640 free now. Congratulations. One side shamed the loss. The other side celebrated it. And 00:12:33.640 --> 00:12:39.920 neither one let you grieve it. So you did the thing that you were trained to do. What 00:12:39.920 --> 00:12:46.160 I was trained to do. You just got past it. And there's a name for what most of us were 00:12:46.160 --> 00:12:53.240 taught instead. A psychologist named John Wellwood coined it back in the 80s. It's called spiritual 00:12:53.240 --> 00:13:01.200 bypassing. Using spiritual language, spiritual practice, even to step around pain instead 00:13:01.200 --> 00:13:13.840 of through it. It sounds holy. It sounds mature. I'm just trusting God. I'm choosing joy today. 00:13:13.840 --> 00:13:22.440 I got this. God's ways are better than mine. And sometimes those are true sentences. But 00:13:22.440 --> 00:13:29.320 a lot of times, in a lot of churches, they're just a trap door. A way to get out of the room 00:13:29.320 --> 00:13:35.920 before the grief finishes its sentence. And you've heard me talk about this all year. 00:13:35.920 --> 00:13:42.160 You don't -- what you feel, what you experience, the feeling you be into experience, it doesn't 00:13:42.160 --> 00:13:50.040 just leave when you go out the trap door. It stores. Marlene went out -- she calls it 00:13:50.040 --> 00:13:55.760 the church version of this religious trauma. And a lot of this room carries it. We carry 00:13:55.760 --> 00:14:07.080 it in our shoulders. It's that weight. Bypassed grief doesn't resolve itself. It just waits. 00:14:07.080 --> 00:14:12.400 The church taught us to resolve grief in one sentence. The body's memory runs much deeper 00:14:12.400 --> 00:14:22.720 than that. So your body still feels it. And here's what's strange. The book that we built 00:14:22.720 --> 00:14:31.400 this curriculum on to bypass, to move on. It never did this. In fact, roughly a third 00:14:31.400 --> 00:14:39.400 of the Psalms, the prayer book of Israel, the songs that Jesus grew up singing Himself, 00:14:39.400 --> 00:14:52.400 a third of them are lament. Complaint, protest. How long, O Lord, why have you forsaken me? 00:14:52.400 --> 00:14:59.600 The Bible gave grief a third of the Psalms, a third of the hymnal that it handed to Israel, 00:14:59.600 --> 00:15:07.800 and church gave it the one sentence to just bypass. And there's one Psalm I've never preached, 00:15:07.800 --> 00:15:14.160 but I think it might be one of the most honest prayers in the whole book of Psalms. Because 00:15:14.160 --> 00:15:22.440 of how it ends. Psalm 88, it's a man in a pit. And listen to how long he's been at this. 00:15:22.440 --> 00:15:29.520 He says, "But I cry to you for help, Lord. In the morning, my prayer comes before you. 00:15:29.520 --> 00:15:35.960 Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?" Morning after morning, he says, 00:15:35.960 --> 00:15:43.280 "He's not faithless here. He's praying. Every morning I come to you. He's doing the thing. 00:15:43.280 --> 00:15:49.720 And nothing is happening. No answer, no relief." The Psalm says his friends have pulled back 00:15:49.720 --> 00:15:55.800 to you. They've kind of just left him because he wants to hang around that guy. And here's 00:15:55.800 --> 00:16:03.960 the thing about lament Psalms. If you go through the book of Psalms, almost all of them turn. 00:16:03.960 --> 00:16:07.880 Like you see the Psalmist right through you like, "Why did you do this? What's happening?" 00:16:07.880 --> 00:16:14.720 And then they turn. Somewhere near the end, there's a butt. But I will trust in you. But 00:16:14.720 --> 00:16:22.560 you, O Lord, I used to teach and I still think this is important, but in Scripture, I always 00:16:22.560 --> 00:16:32.680 look for the butt. There's something after. But in Psalm 81, there's no butt. The last verse 00:16:32.680 --> 00:16:38.240 of Psalm, not 81, Psalm 88, the last verse of Psalm 88, "You have taken from me friend 00:16:38.240 --> 00:16:47.480 and neighbor, darkness is my closest friend." In the scene. And I know you're thinking, 00:16:47.480 --> 00:16:50.760 "Yeah, the Bible doesn't..." Like when they wrote it, they don't cut the chapters. Just 00:16:50.760 --> 00:16:59.480 go on to 89. 89 is a whole different thing. This Psalm ends. Darkness is my closest friend. 00:16:59.480 --> 00:17:07.760 It's like a country Psalm. That's the end. There's no turn. No resolution. Lights out 00:17:07.760 --> 00:17:13.120 in scene. And somebody, an editor or community, the spirit, however you want to look at it, 00:17:13.120 --> 00:17:20.040 looked at that prayer and said, "That goes in the book." Psalm 88 ends in the dark and 00:17:20.040 --> 00:17:27.520 it's in the book. Which means there's a place in Scripture for the day you don't have a 00:17:27.520 --> 00:17:37.400 butt. There's a page for the sentence that doesn't get better. Look at Job, right? Job's 00:17:37.400 --> 00:17:42.680 friends knew this. For exactly seven days, they understood this in the story of Job. 00:17:42.680 --> 00:17:47.320 They came, they saw him, they did the best pastoral care in the Old Testament. Job 2, 00:17:47.320 --> 00:17:52.600 verse 13 says this, "Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. 00:17:52.600 --> 00:17:59.920 No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was. Seven days of 00:17:59.920 --> 00:18:07.960 silence, just presence. It was perfect. And then they opened their mouths. And they spent 00:18:07.960 --> 00:18:15.800 the next 30-some chapters bypassing his grief and suffering, explaining, defending God, 00:18:15.800 --> 00:18:22.560 finding the reason. And at the end of the book, God tells them they did not speak rightly. 00:18:22.560 --> 00:18:30.280 The silence was right. The sentences where their sin came in. And if you look at the 00:18:30.280 --> 00:18:38.640 story of Job, you'll get to notice who God does vindicate at the end of the book. Not 00:18:38.640 --> 00:18:44.920 the friends with the explanations. It's a Job. The one who spent the whole book refusing 00:18:44.920 --> 00:18:52.360 to stop asking. There's an author David Gushy who some of you have heard of. He's written 00:18:52.360 --> 00:19:00.320 quite a few books in the kind of post evangelical space. But he wrote a new book on Job and 00:19:00.320 --> 00:19:06.440 it comes out next month. And in a piece previewing it in his sub-stack I was reading, he says 00:19:06.440 --> 00:19:12.840 this about Job. It says Job offers a model for people whose inherited certainties have 00:19:12.840 --> 00:19:21.960 collapsed, but who refuse to surrender either truthfulness or faith. He calls it Job's 00:19:21.960 --> 00:19:28.320 courage to keep asking the questions, to refuse to bite his tongue in order to remain in good 00:19:28.320 --> 00:19:35.320 standing. He says it's not a lack of faith that Job has. According to the end of the 00:19:35.320 --> 00:19:41.720 book, that is the faith, the hard questions, the what is happening, why? The man who wouldn't 00:19:41.720 --> 00:19:51.440 bypass was the one God said spoke correctly. And here's what grief did to him. Read through 00:19:51.440 --> 00:19:55.040 this book and we may go through it, which is going to be a hard one for me, but I'm in it. 00:19:55.040 --> 00:20:02.680 But here's what grief did to him because, and this is the part that I didn't expect from the 00:20:02.680 --> 00:20:09.320 story. Gushy points out that somewhere in the middle of the book, Job stops talking about his 00:20:09.320 --> 00:20:17.520 own suffering and he starts describing other peoples. And Job 24, he talks about the homeless 00:20:17.520 --> 00:20:23.960 driven off the roads, the hungry harvesting food that they can't eat, the widow's animal's 00:20:23.960 --> 00:20:30.240 taken as collateral. Gushy, his line in this, he says, Job went from the penthouse to the 00:20:30.240 --> 00:20:36.840 dung hill outside of town. And from the dung hill, it said that he was sitting on the dung hill, 00:20:36.840 --> 00:20:46.720 he was viewing life from below rather than from above. Things look different from the city dump 00:20:46.720 --> 00:20:53.080 than from the city gate. And Gushy says, Job lifting his gaze from his own pain to everyone 00:20:53.080 --> 00:21:03.320 else's is a sign not just of his integrity, but perhaps also of his growth. Because this is what 00:21:03.320 --> 00:21:14.400 lament does when you let it finish. It doesn't curl you inward, it widens you. Right? Like the 00:21:14.400 --> 00:21:18.720 grief you were never allowed to feel is also the grief that would have let you see people. 00:21:20.960 --> 00:21:30.000 Hold that. It's, it's where we're going to go next week. Last summer, after devastating floods 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:40.920 in curvil, I stood up here and I said, Jesus doesn't skip grief. Standing outside of Lazarus's 00:21:40.920 --> 00:21:49.200 tomb, knowing, knowing he was about to call the man out of his death. He wept anyway. He didn't 00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:55.120 bypass the ending he already knew. He stood in the grief for the people he loved and he let it 00:21:55.120 --> 00:22:05.400 be what it was. And what happened to Job on the dung hill? Like pain shrinking him until he could 00:22:05.400 --> 00:22:14.040 finally see past himself. It's not just a Bible story. This is where my worlds collide and where I 00:22:14.040 --> 00:22:23.920 love this intersection of faith and theology and psychology. Like this idea that him going through 00:22:23.920 --> 00:22:31.200 this pain shrinks him until he can finally see past himself is the exact thing that all research 00:22:31.200 --> 00:22:42.320 measures. When I talk about this, this emotion of awe, this is it. I've talked about Dacher Keltner a 00:22:42.320 --> 00:22:47.280 lot. He's the, the psych researcher that this whole year of awe has kind of leaned on for his 00:22:47.280 --> 00:22:53.760 research and he's the person whose book awe I read and it like sent me back to school to learn and 00:22:53.760 --> 00:23:02.160 study psychology. In the book, Keltner talks about the fact that his brother, his best friend in 00:23:02.160 --> 00:23:14.640 life got sick and he dies of cancer. And in that the middle of his grief of losing his best friend 00:23:14.640 --> 00:23:23.440 of watching his, his brother dwindle his humanity dwindle from him. He says that he started noticing 00:23:23.440 --> 00:23:32.640 something else moving in him. Small moments of this thing he called awe. Not instead of the grief, 00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:39.680 but inside it. And then when his team said, we're going to go do research and find where people 00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:45.920 experience the emotion of awe. They went to 26 countries and they asked these questions of people 00:23:45.920 --> 00:23:52.640 and they said, we're the most common things that you experience where you experience this emotion of 00:23:52.640 --> 00:24:00.800 awe. And across cultures, 26 countries, it wasn't just this idea of seeing the beautiful stars in the 00:24:00.800 --> 00:24:09.520 sky. One of the eight things, the wonders of life that Keltner says, bring awe to us was death, 00:24:11.920 --> 00:24:20.320 losing someone, facing their own mortality. In his book, he lists those eight wonders of life. 00:24:20.320 --> 00:24:26.480 The things that most reliably produce awe in a human being and life and death is on the list. 00:24:28.240 --> 00:24:33.200 Right there next to the night sky and humans being kind to each other. 00:24:36.000 --> 00:24:42.160 And what that same study found awe does to a person, I believe that's what it did to Joe. 00:24:44.080 --> 00:24:52.000 It shrinks the self, not in a shaming way, but in a proportion way, like you feel small in front 00:24:52.000 --> 00:25:02.560 of something enormous. And the moment you do, you're gaze widens. People who just felt awe 00:25:03.120 --> 00:25:09.520 in all of their studies, they found were more generous, more connected, more aware of the people 00:25:09.520 --> 00:25:18.240 around them. The technical term is small self. The plain version is that awe reminds you you're 00:25:18.240 --> 00:25:26.720 part of something much bigger than your own pain. That's Job's lifting his eyes from the 00:25:26.720 --> 00:25:34.240 dung hill to the people on the road. A year ago, I put it this way, grief breaks our hearts, 00:25:35.680 --> 00:25:37.840 but it also opens them to awe. 00:25:41.360 --> 00:25:46.720 Now, guardrail here, and I mean it like, I'm not saying your pain has a purpose. 00:25:48.720 --> 00:25:54.640 That's not what I'm trying to put across here. I'm not saying God sent it to teach you something. 00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:02.240 I don't believe that that's how God operates. That's bypassing again. That's like, it's okay, 00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:08.080 just stay in it because there's purpose here. What I'm saying is narrower than that. I think 00:26:08.080 --> 00:26:14.480 it's probably a truer idea. That the door grief opens in a person, and the door that 00:26:14.480 --> 00:26:21.600 awe opens are the same door. Both kind of crack you open as a human. 00:26:23.920 --> 00:26:27.120 Both make you small in front of something enormous. 00:26:29.200 --> 00:26:32.480 Both require you to stop managing everything for a second, 00:26:34.400 --> 00:26:42.640 which means the faith that taught you to slam the door on grief. It also shut the door on awe, 00:26:42.640 --> 00:26:50.800 too, because it's the same one. In fact, Brene Brown says it like this, 00:26:51.680 --> 00:26:57.120 we cannot selectively numb emotion. If we numb the dark, we numb the light. 00:26:57.920 --> 00:27:03.840 If we take the edge off pain and discomfort, we are, by default, taking the edge off joy, 00:27:03.840 --> 00:27:08.400 love, belonging, and the other emotions that give meaning to our lives. 00:27:12.320 --> 00:27:15.760 I think she said it better. You can't selectively numb your emotions. 00:27:17.360 --> 00:27:20.880 When you numb painful emotions, you numb the good ones right along with them. 00:27:22.640 --> 00:27:27.520 And this isn't just a nice line from Brene. The lab backs her up. 00:27:27.520 --> 00:27:32.240 The research on this is there. A Stanford researcher named James Gross has spent decades 00:27:32.240 --> 00:27:38.400 studying what happens when people suppress what they feel, and the finding is almost cruel. 00:27:38.400 --> 00:27:44.960 Suppression doesn't actually reduce the pain. People who stuff it report feeling just as bad, 00:27:44.960 --> 00:27:54.880 sometimes worse. What it reliably reduces is joy. The numbing doesn't work on the thing. 00:27:54.880 --> 00:27:58.720 It's aimed at the pain that they're trying to numb. It doesn't actually 00:27:58.720 --> 00:28:02.720 numb that. You can't selectively numb what it does is it reduces joy. 00:28:06.720 --> 00:28:14.880 Past couple of weeks, I've been listening to a book by Rob Bell. It's called "How to Be Here." 00:28:14.880 --> 00:28:20.080 I'm going to quote something from it, but I need to walk you through kind of how he gets there first, 00:28:20.720 --> 00:28:26.400 because the path he uses is the point and that the statement could come across as bypassing. 00:28:28.080 --> 00:28:32.560 He doesn't start with suffering in the story. He starts with a blinking cursor. 00:28:33.200 --> 00:28:38.080 Think about opening a word document in the cursor's blinking on a blank page. 00:28:40.320 --> 00:28:45.440 The first thing a blank page says to every human who has ever faced one is, 00:28:46.800 --> 00:28:53.760 "Who are you to do this?" That's where he begins. The terror and the gift of being 00:28:53.760 --> 00:29:00.240 handed a page at all. He takes the page and he says, "This is what life is. You are handed a page." 00:29:02.320 --> 00:29:04.720 And then he asks, "What gets you out of bed in the morning?" 00:29:06.320 --> 00:29:09.520 He borrows the Japanese word. Have you guys heard this? The Ikigai? 00:29:10.720 --> 00:29:16.640 Ikigai is the reason for being here in the Japanese culture. You find this thing. This is 00:29:16.640 --> 00:29:22.960 your guiding force. And then he takes the Ikigai and he gets real practical. He says, 00:29:22.960 --> 00:29:28.480 "You don't need to see like 17 steps," because that's 16 steps too far. 00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:32.880 Do the one that's right in front of you. Start with number one. 00:29:33.760 --> 00:29:39.280 And it's only after all of that, after he's convinced you that the page is actually yours 00:29:39.280 --> 00:29:44.960 to write, that he then turns to loss. And here's the sentence he says. 00:29:47.040 --> 00:29:56.080 Suffering in loss, have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is. 00:29:59.280 --> 00:30:03.920 Notice the order he built this in though. He's not saying suffering is a gift. 00:30:05.360 --> 00:30:10.080 He's saying suffering wakes you up to a gift you already had and you had stopped noticing. 00:30:12.720 --> 00:30:19.360 Which is last week we talked about Jacob where he says, "God was in this place and I was not aware of 00:30:19.360 --> 00:30:28.000 it." It's that waking up. It's loss, Bella is saying here that loss is a brutal alarm clock. 00:30:29.200 --> 00:30:35.840 But it's an alarm clock, not a verdict. It's a wake-up call. And then he takes to the last step. 00:30:36.400 --> 00:30:42.400 He says, "You've been given the gift of life." Pause, breathe. 00:30:46.240 --> 00:30:49.760 If you're here breathing in this room, 00:30:52.320 --> 00:30:53.600 you already received the gift. 00:30:57.040 --> 00:31:03.200 Whatever else is or isn't true about your life, the one thing that settled is you're here breathing. 00:31:05.680 --> 00:31:11.040 And the way he lands the whole book, give it away, but it's a good book. You should read it. 00:31:12.240 --> 00:31:16.400 All of us are taking part in this ongoing creation of the world. 00:31:17.920 --> 00:31:20.640 You're not a spectator to your own life. You've got a page. 00:31:23.120 --> 00:31:28.560 This is the through line that he talks about. It's a blank page. It's your page. Do the one thing, 00:31:29.680 --> 00:31:33.920 maybe loss wakes you up to the gift that you already have life and that you get a chance to 00:31:33.920 --> 00:31:41.840 write a page. And then the reminder that you're a partner in what's still being made and created in 00:31:41.840 --> 00:31:49.200 this world. And Bella knows this road from the inside. Like if you don't know who Rob Bella is, 00:31:49.200 --> 00:31:54.400 he's a pastor. He wrote a book called Love Wins. In Love Wins and one of the chapters in this book, 00:31:55.200 --> 00:32:04.640 he just opined that maybe hell doesn't really make sense in a burning pit of throat. I don't 00:32:04.640 --> 00:32:11.440 know what to do with that, he said, as a pastor. And the minute he did that, he lost his church. 00:32:12.480 --> 00:32:16.720 He lost respect. He was kicked out and he was told, "You've got to go." 00:32:18.880 --> 00:32:22.400 So he understands what loss looks like from an entire life 00:32:24.240 --> 00:32:27.440 structure for him. Everything he knew was gone. 00:32:30.080 --> 00:32:37.200 So this blank page wasn't a metaphor for him. In fact, he's the one that in his podcast I listen to 00:32:37.200 --> 00:32:44.400 almost every year where he talks about the story that I've told here about leaving the system and 00:32:44.400 --> 00:32:53.680 going up river. It's this idea of sometimes you're called to something that nobody else is going to 00:32:53.680 --> 00:32:59.280 understand. But they're not supposed to because it's yours. It's your page to write, not theirs. 00:33:02.400 --> 00:33:08.000 Now, watch all these pieces connect because there was one more clip that I was actually sent this 00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:15.520 week on Instagram from a friend. It's a pastor, his name's Joe Smith, and he was teaching on wonder. 00:33:16.880 --> 00:33:22.080 And he said something in it that my friend was like, "Hey, you got to hear this. I think this 00:33:22.080 --> 00:33:27.840 is going to resonate with you." And Joe Smith said this, "Empire wants more than our bodies. 00:33:28.880 --> 00:33:38.800 Empire wants to colonize our imagination." The idea that, look, hold it. Look at this. Put this 00:33:38.800 --> 00:33:44.480 idea. Empire wants your imagination. Take that and go back to Dr. Hansen in the very beginning where 00:33:44.480 --> 00:33:52.640 she said, "Hope is trained imagination." Now, my question is, how does empire take that imagination? 00:33:54.560 --> 00:34:01.040 Go to the next one real quick, Nate. So, hope is trained imagination. Dr. Hansen says, 00:34:01.040 --> 00:34:05.280 "Empire wants your imagination." Joe Smith says, "How does empire take it? Go to the next one?" 00:34:06.320 --> 00:34:13.360 With numbness. Like, think about our lives right now. Are you supposed to have feelings? 00:34:15.440 --> 00:34:20.080 The algorithm is trying to keep you out of feeling things. Like, go to the next thing. Go to the 00:34:20.080 --> 00:34:27.360 next thing. You can't. You can't worry. In fact, the whole idea of enemy creation, which we've 00:34:27.360 --> 00:34:34.720 talked about before, for me to say that someone is an enemy to you, I have to take away their 00:34:34.720 --> 00:34:39.920 humanity. And in order to, when I take away their humanity, what does that do? Well, that numbs 00:34:39.920 --> 00:34:44.800 feelings for another human being because now they're just a label. So, I've numbed your feeling 00:34:44.800 --> 00:34:49.840 towards that human. And I've brought you back inside. What have I brought you back inside to? 00:34:49.840 --> 00:34:56.480 Well, I've used fear to say that, "Hey, this group of people is going to take your jobs." 00:35:00.960 --> 00:35:04.800 And you, "Well, I don't want that to happen. I need to protect myself." 00:35:06.640 --> 00:35:10.240 And no longer is it a human being, it is a group. 00:35:12.480 --> 00:35:20.560 And I can numb you to humanity, and then I can take away your imagination. Because if I can 00:35:20.560 --> 00:35:25.760 keep people either comfortable, distracted, or fearful, I can keep them managed, keep them from 00:35:25.760 --> 00:35:30.800 feeling the thing. And they'll gradually lose the ability to picture anything different. Like, 00:35:30.800 --> 00:35:36.400 think about what Dr. Hansen said. Martin Luther King Jr. hadn't seen the beloved community yet, 00:35:37.120 --> 00:35:42.160 but he could imagine it. But if I take away your ability to imagine the beloved community, 00:35:43.200 --> 00:35:44.800 then you won't even start step one. 00:35:48.800 --> 00:35:52.000 You gradually lose the ability to picture anything different. 00:35:52.720 --> 00:36:02.560 Numbed people are very governable people. Walter Brookman said this 50 years ago, his little book, 00:36:02.560 --> 00:36:07.200 it's called The Prophetic Imagination. He noticed that the prophets of Israel, like Jeremiah, 00:36:07.200 --> 00:36:12.400 they were weepers, they were cryers. He did something strange every time that they would come to 00:36:12.400 --> 00:36:16.400 prophesy. They did something strange as their first act. If you go into the Old Testament, 00:36:16.400 --> 00:36:25.040 before they announced anything new, they grieved out loud in public. Because Pharaoh's whole system, 00:36:25.040 --> 00:36:29.840 the empire that controlled them, the whole system runs on nobody feeling anything. 00:36:31.520 --> 00:36:38.400 And public grief is the crack in it. Brookman's claim, and I'm paraphrasing this, 00:36:39.760 --> 00:36:48.080 is that only grief permits newness. You cannot get to a new thing without grieving the old one 00:36:48.080 --> 00:36:54.560 all the way through. And here's a part people miss, I think about Brookman. The grief isn't 00:36:54.560 --> 00:37:03.360 where the prophet stops. It's where the new song becomes possible. The same tradition that gave 00:37:03.360 --> 00:37:10.640 us Jeremiah weeping gave us Isaiah's comfort, comfort my people. But the comfort only lands on 00:37:10.640 --> 00:37:19.840 people who were allowed to weep first, who knew they needed the comfort. Skip the weeping, 00:37:19.840 --> 00:37:25.040 and the comfort is just another bypassing sentence. Do the weeping and comfort because 00:37:25.040 --> 00:37:34.800 becomes something a body can actually receive. So lament, this idea of like the song, the songs 00:37:34.800 --> 00:37:39.520 having a third of them being lament, we've lost that. There was a study a while back that studied 00:37:39.520 --> 00:37:47.120 all the top songs in the church that we all sing. And I am guilty of this as, I'm like Paul, 00:37:47.120 --> 00:37:50.960 I am the center of centers, right? I am guilty. I don't want to sing these songs. 00:37:52.720 --> 00:37:58.960 But they went through and they did this whole study that like 5% of the top 100 songs that the 00:37:58.960 --> 00:38:08.240 churches sing in the U.S. lament, 95 of them are about victory and triumph. We've lost the ability 00:38:08.240 --> 00:38:17.600 to lament. We didn't lose it. We've been trained not to have it. But when we see that lament isn't 00:38:17.600 --> 00:38:25.360 weakness, it isn't wallowing. We can see that lament is actually resistance. It's the practice 00:38:25.360 --> 00:38:31.840 that keeps your imagination from being uncolonized. The person who can still weep is the person who 00:38:31.840 --> 00:38:40.960 can still picture a different world. I say this all the time when I'm talking about the idea of 00:38:40.960 --> 00:38:46.640 awe that fear narrows us and awe widens us. You know this line, I've said it. Here's the kind of 00:38:46.640 --> 00:38:55.840 addendum to that numbness narrows us to. And the only road back to wide runs through the lament, 00:38:58.480 --> 00:39:02.800 which takes me to the first page of the Bible. And then we're done. In Genesis 1, 00:39:03.360 --> 00:39:08.480 before there is anything, there is darkness over the deep. And look at the first thing God does 00:39:08.480 --> 00:39:15.200 with the dark. He doesn't flee it. He doesn't explain it. He doesn't say at least there's says 00:39:15.200 --> 00:39:19.600 this. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit 00:39:19.600 --> 00:39:26.080 of God was hovering over the waters and God said, let there be light. He speaks into the darkness. 00:39:27.600 --> 00:39:31.120 Speaking into the darkness is the first creative act in the universe. 00:39:33.680 --> 00:39:41.040 But that's what lament is speaking the true thing into the dark out loud so that nothing new can 00:39:41.600 --> 00:39:45.760 nothing new can start to be made until you're in the darkness and you sit in it for a minute. 00:39:48.160 --> 00:39:52.560 It's not passive. It's the opposite. It's not the opposite of faith. It is literally how creation 00:39:52.560 --> 00:39:59.120 has always started. And if Rob Bell is right that we're partners in this ongoing creation of 00:39:59.120 --> 00:40:05.600 the world, then your lament is you picking up the family trade and saying, I'm going to create 00:40:05.600 --> 00:40:13.440 in this. But in order to create in this, I have to feel the first thing God did with darkness was 00:40:13.440 --> 00:40:19.520 speak into it. So here's the practice that we're going to do this week. Again, these are small 00:40:19.520 --> 00:40:24.320 versions, small practices. I told you last week, go on an awak. I didn't ask anybody if they did it. 00:40:24.320 --> 00:40:28.960 There's no leaderboard. If you did it, amazing. If you didn't, cool. Try it this week. Like, 00:40:28.960 --> 00:40:34.480 there's no, nobody's winning anything here. These are just, these are practices to begin to learn. 00:40:35.680 --> 00:40:39.920 The awak was, hey, go out and walk like you've never seen any of this before. This is all new to you. 00:40:42.160 --> 00:40:45.040 For this one, it's going to be a little different. I want you to write the prayer that you were 00:40:45.040 --> 00:40:56.400 never allowed to pray. The one that got edited out of you, the angry one, the where were you prayer? 00:40:58.160 --> 00:41:04.320 The one with no but at the end, like Psalm 88 with your name on it, write it down, paper, 00:41:04.320 --> 00:41:13.200 notes app, the back of whatever. Here's the rule. Nobody has to read it. Now me, you don't have to 00:41:13.200 --> 00:41:18.480 post this on Instagram. Like God's not going to read it. He'll see it. But you know, you don't have 00:41:18.480 --> 00:41:24.160 to be like, here God, read this. Not your group. Like nobody has to read this. This is your prayer. 00:41:26.880 --> 00:41:32.240 It's private by design because the whole point is a sentence you've never been allowed to say. 00:41:33.920 --> 00:41:39.680 And the only way to practice saying it is to say it. If nothing happens when you write it, 00:41:39.680 --> 00:41:46.160 you know the rule by now like nothing happened and that's perfectly fine. You told the truth in the 00:41:46.160 --> 00:41:54.320 dark and that's how everything starts. You're not out of hope. You're just out of practice. 00:41:56.000 --> 00:42:01.520 And you've got a page and there's a blinking cursor and it's your page and only you can write it. 00:42:04.480 --> 00:42:11.600 You're made to be a conduit and a representation of the love of God. Every single person in here 00:42:11.600 --> 00:42:17.360 is uniquely made to do that in your own unique way. I can't love people the way Māori can. 00:42:19.360 --> 00:42:24.560 And she can't love people the way I can. But that's the beauty of our differences. 00:42:26.640 --> 00:42:35.680 But in order to be that conduit and a representation of the love of God, we're made to practice that 00:42:35.680 --> 00:42:43.040 love. But some weeks love sounds like grief. And I want to invite you into that and give you 00:42:43.040 --> 00:42:49.280 permission to do that just as I've had to give myself permission to do it and still do it. 00:42:49.280 --> 00:42:51.840 This is one of the things that I will probably be learning for the rest of my life. 00:42:54.880 --> 00:43:00.480 But it invites us into creation. And I think for us to be able to love and create and 00:43:00.480 --> 00:43:03.840 help us create that the world that we all want. 00:43:07.120 --> 00:43:15.840 We can't be numb any longer. So Arsenal, do that. Step into it. Write your prayer and then go 00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:20.000 love well. It's who you're made to be. Love you guys. We'll see you next week. 00:43:22.240 --> 00:43:24.240 That's it. That's it. That's it. Love you guys. 00:43:24.880 --> 00:43:25.200 [APPLAUSE]